The Expanse creators talk about crafting a good ending for the show

The Expanse is ending, either with season 6 or…at another time. Either way, the creatives have a good handle on how they want it to bow out.

It’s been a busy month for The Expanse, Amazon’s excellent sci-fi political thriller. The show is in the middle of its fifth season, which may be the best so far. We also learned that it had been renewed for a sixth season…but nothing beyond that. Season 6 is the end.

Or so it appears…pretty soon after that announcement was made, cast and crew members started talking like there could be more to come. After all, The Expanse books by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck run nine entires, and the show has adapted roughly one book per season. Won’t we be missing out on three if the show ends at season 6? “[W]hat I will say is that there’s definitely more to tell and I’m sure Ty and Daniel would say exactly the same thing,” showrunner Naren Shankar recently told Entertainment Weekly. “But yeah, that’s probably about as much as I can say at this point.”

Although just to be clear, ending the show with six seasons was always a possibility the creative team discussed, since the end of the sixth book — Babylon’s Ashes — brings the story up to that point to a natural end; the final three books take place 30 years later. “At the end of every season, Ty and Daniel and I will sit down, and we’ll start talking about what the plan is going forward,” Shankar said. “And over the years, this show has had so many near death experiences along the way. It feels like every season. But we’ve talked about many different versions of how to tell the story. We would be like, ‘Well, what if we only go four seasons? What if we get to six seasons?’ So we’ve crafted different versions of this.”

"One of the versions that we talked about for a number of years was the six-season arc of it. Would we be able to get to the end if we only got six seasons? Would we be able to do something satisfying at the end? And we all felt that that was absolutely possible. And so I think we’re in that mode, that framework. So the answer is basically, yeah, we have talked about that last ending scene and we talked about it for quite some time. And I think what we’ve got on paper at this point definitely is that thing that we talked about many years ago."

So the show could end for good with season 6…but as the cast and crew members are fond of saying lately, we’ll see what happens.

But whether the show gets more seasons or not, the end of season 6 will feel like a climax to everything that’s happened so far. “That was actually the easiest part about Season 6, because the end of the sixth book is a pretty natural pause point in the story,” Franck told SYFY WIRE. “It has a satisfying ending and sort of wraps up the inner solar system political drama we’ve set up over the first five books, and kind of brings a sort of stability to that system at the end of the sixth book, as the three major political groups find a way to live together and create a stable economic society. So getting to that point in the next season I think will feel satisfying.”

That said, if you’ve read Babylon’s Ashes, don’t assume you already know how season 6 will wrap up. “[S]ome things in Season 6 are going to surprise people,” Franck said. As Daniel Abraham explains, the show and the books have never been one-to-one adaptations:

"I’ve always looked at the show as being a sort of retelling of the same story, so it feels very independent to me from the book version. I don’t think there’s a need there to keep those working in lockstep, which gives us some freedom. Even as we’re keeping true to the spirit, moving into the last act of the show there’s a natural shape to the show and the underlying story, and I think putting those two where they reinforce each other and get to a graceful stepping off place has been, creatively, really satisfying and effective."

The intrigue mounts.

And how about even further in the future, after the show is completely over? What legacy does Franck want this story to have?

"I know what I was thinking when I wrote it, and what Daniel was thinking when he wrote it. But what each audience member takes away from that is entirely through the lens of their perspective. I think if anything, the one thing I hope people watching this show agree on is that any situation has multiple ways of viewing it. Depending on the angle you view it from, you get a completely different perspective. Maybe just broadening out our horizons a little bit, and being willing to look at things through multiple angles, that’s my takeaway."

New episodes of The Expanse come out every Wednesday on Amazon Prime Video.

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